


Catching Up

by sonotfine



Series: Steward and Lionheart [2]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2021-02-08 05:07:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21470542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonotfine/pseuds/sonotfine
Summary: Mordred isn’t mad that he admitted to spying on him in the Source, the Exarch thought wryly to himself. You couldn’t find a more understanding friend than that.But maybe it’s the sandwich bribes.(male miqo’te WoL & Exarch; a friendship)
Series: Steward and Lionheart [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1546348
Kudos: 7





	Catching Up

“Did I look like what you expected when you saw me again?”

Mordred was staring at the Exarch with keen, curious eyes, his hand over his mouth because he had spoken around a mouthful of sandwich. He loved eating, the Exarch — no, _G’raha_, for with Mordred he could be G’raha — had found out. He loved eating food G’raha made, specifically, a thought that left him warm.

The question not so much. G’raha looked back down at the book in front of him, then sighed and closed it. Took a little time to put it aside to recenter himself, though even he did not know why he hesitated.

“Sometimes, when you are close to the Crystal Tower on the Source, I could peer through and see you,” G’raha admitted, and by it realized why he didn’t want to talk about this. He’d been spying on Mordred, and the thought was uncomfortable. He kept the fidgeting in check, however, by lacing his hands together. (Still couldn’t look at Mordred.) “And you frequented it often after the Domans settled there, so I saw you for...a time.”

G’raha trailed off, remembering how time on the Source had leapt forward months, years, in a matter of days here on the First, and when he next peered in as Mordred’s presence drew close to the Crystal Tower’s range, it had been after the Dragonsong War. How tired and tense he had seemed, leaning his weight on his wrought-iron staff, his ears pinned back and tail swinging low.

And then again, in the breath of air after Doma’s liberation, as Mordred had rushed around Mor Dhona to help the displaced Domans prepare for their journey home. He had looked different then too; cut his hair, kept it better, let it fan around his head in soft, layered waves. Brighter eyes and a tempered confidence to his steps. And G’raha had kept pace between those glimpses and the records he had brought over from their doomed future, telling himself how little time he had left before things fell apart, to snatch the Warrior of Light from the jaws of death—

G’raha shook himself free and looked up, to meet Mordred’s eyes.

To find him staring with a grin.

“Observing me in my natural environment, huh,” Mordred said. “Now I feel bad. Could’ve stand to come to Mor Dhona more often. But it was a thousand gils between teleport and the night-day cycles fucked me up.”

“You didn’t have to,” G’raha reassured him hastily, then grimaced. “You would hardly even know I was looking...Though I did see you come near the Crystal Tower every now and again.”

When he did, G’raha had been guilty — as much as he’d been glad. That a friend he made over the course of the six, seven months they had while raiding the Crystal Tower had...

Had loved him so? Had missed him?

“Besides,” he said, trying to hurry the conversation along. “I think it’s indisputable that between the two of us, I am the one with the more dramatic changes.”

Mordred inclined his head one way. Then the other. His soft ears flared, then flicked. “Guess so.”

G’raha smiled wryly. “You don’t have to be modest. I see my reflection every time I look in the mirror.” He dried his hands on a cloth towel, then sat down at the table across from Mordred. The high windows of the Crystal Tower’s kitchen — where they were — poured sunlight through, making G’raha’s crystal arm sparkle.

Mordred’s eyes were fixed on the limb, his pupils tight, ears flicking in interest. Then he looked up at the wall above them, watching the arm’s colored reflection dance. “Yeah,” he said, full of approval.

G’raha picked up the last sandwich remaining on the plate and ate it, just for spite.

“Hey!” Mordred puffed his cheeks out, and his tail flicked G’raha’s leg under the table, but the expression was quick to fade. He grinned. “I’m glad. Considering everything...I didn’t know how much I changed from when— you went away, ‘til you dragged me ass-first into the First.”

“I did not drag you ass-first,” G’raha retorted, appalled. “If you must know, the first thing I did was to tune the Tower’s resonance to your soul’s, and when I had a match—“

“That explained the splitting headaches,” Mordred muttered into his fist, sounding thoughtful.

G’raha winced. “Yes. I’m very sorry about that, but it was difficult to say the least. I would have thought your soul in combination to the Blessing of Light would make you that much easier to spot, and it was, yet somehow I could never get a good...grip, I suppose, on you.”

“‘Cos I’m not close to the Crystal Tower,” Mordred pointed out. He leaned forward and leaned his chin in his hand, eyes sparked with scholarly interest now. “Proximity probably has something to do with it, as you were able to drag me over when I was literally at the Tower’s base.”

“Yes.” G’raha cleared his throat guiltily. And also because there wasn’t anybody else to grab, was what he didn’t say.

“And it wasn’t for want of better alternatives,” Mordred said bluntly, before G’raha could start remembering Alisaie’s and Y’shtola’s disapprovals. “Tataru was right next to me but you got me, in specific. She didn’t even hear your voice.”

Ah, yes. Tataru. The Scions’ registrar that Mordred had been close with. G’raha nodded slowly, remembering “seeing” her in that faint instance where he reached across the Rift.

“You’re right,” G’raha said blandly. “I do wish you would come by the Tower more often, after all. Or at least Mor Dhona. But to come back around to your remark, I technically dragged you here soul-first, not...ass-first.”

Mordred rolled his eyes and muttered something, like he used to when G’raha tagged along with his forays into the Shroud to gather tea leaves or something at old ladies’ or conjurers’ behests while they waited for Rammbroes to make headway with the Tower — no, whenever Rammbroes got fed up with G’raha’s intense meddling and kicked him out of camp.

The memory of being sent away from his most important project, which ended up being so irrevocably tied to his destiny, still made G’raha want to sulk. He swallowed it down with practice and the weariness of old age.

“Maybe you should’ve tried to negotiate my ass first,” Mordred said. “Woulda fit more easily through the Rift than my soul, anyway, which many creepy fuckwits had gushed over how big and bright it is.”

G’raha forgot Mordred was this kind of person.

“Yes, well, mine was no bigger, trust me.” He put the half-eaten sandwich down, and tutted as Mordred immediately kidnapped it back. “And they had to attach some very complicated machineries to the Tower in order to send me on my way, so it would have been triple the amount of work, if not quadruple.”

His own journey here was also made possible due to his bond with the behemoth structure. It had, in its artificial and very undefined sentience, wanted to protect him. Not so Mordred, who G’raha had to reset the alarm systems to stop the Tower from thinking of him as an invader before he could even think about trying to teleport him.

Given how he had marshaled up twenty-three other adventurer friends to absolutely wreck some of the interior in the past, however, G’raha wasn’t about to fault the alarms.

“Did the machineries stop working once you arrived?” Mordred asked curiously.

“They did,” G’raha confirmed. Then sighed. “And I do not know how to operate them. Enough of the machines were also in pieces, so I couldn’t reverse-engineer them either. I should’ve asked the engineers to include the plans.”

“I can get the plans for you,” Mordred said.

“They haven’t been created in your time, yet,” G’raha pointed out wryly. “And the minds that made them aren’t the people...alive...” The word was hard to choke out but he managed it, “...over there right now. It was the work of two, three generations.”

At that, Mordred grew oddly quiet. He sat back and hunched his shoulders, expression contemplative.

G’raha thinned his mouth in concern, but left the mage to it. Mordred did this too, back in the days. Pockets of time when he simply shut off seemingly to process, sometimes for mere seconds and sometimes for days, and G’raha supposed it was because things were shifting into perspectives for him again. Their mangled pasts, their shaky, cobbled-together future — and the rift between them. This G’raha Tia who came from a different time, a different outcome, and Mordred, still the same.

“What will you do,” G’raha said unbidden, before he could stop the words, “when your G’raha awakens?”

“I’d be long gone,” Mordred said, the answer immediate. He had clearly been thinking about it too. “But thanks to you, the world he wakes up to will be changed, but better.” 

Something in G’raha softened, then. He’d asked out of a moment of fear — of remembering that he wasn’t the man Mordred Surana had befriended, not really — but it comforted him and warmed him strangely (immensely) that, after everything, perhaps they had pried their ruined future out of despair’s grasp.

And that he, the him who he would not get to be, on the Source now, in Mordred’s time, would need never witness or endure what he had.

How strange it was, how bittersweet, to forge a future for yourself you would never experience. But G’raha reminded himself that it was selfish to think only of that G’raha Tia; that the true reward was the world they would need never lose.

This one, too, that they had wrenched back from the edge of oblivion, tooth and nail. G’raha glanced up to the high windows and closed his eyes, letting the natural, warm sunlight wash over him for a moment. Some days the victory over the Light still felt less real than others.

He was fine with that. Mordred had told him it would sink in eventually, even though they would have years of consequences to deal with. Centuries. Millennia.

But Mordred had said it confidently, and neither the Crystal Exarch nor G’raha Tia doubted him.

“But,” G’raha said now, in this precious present, keeping his tone light, “if you intend to inspect what remained of the technologies that bore me and the Crystal Tower to the First, I can have them assembled for you.”

“I would,” Mordred agreed, sitting back and slapping the table, clearly trying to shake his brain back into wherever it had wandered. “In the meantime, I’ll talk to Cid.”

Ah, Cid Garlond. G’raha suppressed the twinge of something dangerously close to homesickness in himself. The man’s face was all over the scientific papers he read to catch up to the world back then, not to mention his name, but G’raha could barely remember what Cid Garlond was like.

“You will go back to the Source, then?” he asked Mordred, knowing the answer but not quite wanting to hear even though it was childish.

“For awhile,” Mordred agreed, and grinned, toothy, but his eyes were soft. “I’ll be back. Now that I’ve set foot here, you can’t get rid of me if you try.”

“We’re all glad for that,” G’raha replied dryly, but he meant it.


End file.
